This company is paying dividend for 210 years

Alongside Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Netflix which never paid dividends, there are companies which have been dividend abiding for decades and centuries. Popular among them are Exxon Mobil, Eli Lily, Abbott, Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Colgate-Palmolive.T he York Water Company is the world’s longest dividend paying company since its inception in year 1816 which is for 210 years. 

In May 2026 it declared its 621st consecutive quarterly dividend. About 53% is owned by institutional investors, 43% by retail and public investors, and 4% by company insiders including employees and board members. Key investors include BlackRock owns 13%, Vanguard 7.5%, Zimmer 5%, and Morgan Stanley 4.5%. The company has optimum leverage.

It avails lower coupon floating rate debt and fully hedges its risk with interest rate swaps. Its pricing structure funds its infrastructure replacement needs. Another reason for currently being high in news is its $47.7 million follow-on equity issue in April 2026. The 8% discount priced equity issue is a corporate finance strategy. The follow-on issue will have no takers if made at or above market price.

While the market share price immediately fell up to the issue price, due to the discount-led high demand, the share price rose back to pre-issue levels. This is because market realized the intrinsic value and rushed to price it fair. The company exercised even a greenshoe option and mobilized more money than targeted.

York Water is oldest public private partnership (PPP) companies and oldest collective investors owned entity. It was first started to prevent town fires by collecting water from wells and quickly became a water supplying entity. As metal pipes did not exist 200 years ago, York Water created holes in wooden logs and used for supplying water. It built the first water filter plant, and innovated many things in quality, quantity and management practices related to water supply and wastewater management. 

The company has only 100 employees and provides safe water to 212,000 residents across 57 municipalities in Pennsylvania.York Water is appreciated as the best reforesting of evergreens effort in the world. Considered as best governance companies, with highest institutional public investment and clean track, York Water has been a high liquid stock despite being a small cap company. The company enjoys a resilient EBITDA margin of 50% and net profit margin of 25% despite being heavily regulated entity on the prices it can charge from its customers.

The company has enjoyed great goodwill from its customers. It has also been making capex investments regularly due to which about 50% of annual revenue is reinvested into regular infra upgradation. It has been broadly adopting 60% dividend payout ratio. In the past 200 years, it increased dividend amount by 30 times. Its dividend yield has been 3% to 4% but remained stable with very low risk. The company is rewarded by the market for its high capital efficiency and the stock trades at 20 price-earnings ratio.

It has mostly been a defence beta stock. York Water has been a blue chip and many retail investors handover shares of York Water down their generations. When global highest valued companies are not paying dividends, by paying dividends for 210 years, York Water stands as an ideal example in the stock market.

—Dr. Kishore Nuthalapati

(Dr. Kishore is CFO of BEKEM Infra Projects Pvt Ltd, Hyderabad.)